Notes on the Three Doors
I would like to make a few practical prompts for direct investigation and experience of the samadhis described in this chapter. I have kept the prompt general, but if it will help you to be concrete, you may like to choose someone or something specific to reflect on as you read through. Examples: my husband, my cat.
1. Emptiness–of a separate self: where is the single, identifiable, unchanging thing to which you can apply all the statements you would like to make about X. Find it. Can you find anything that has those characteristics? If you find something, is that thing exclusively X, or can it be described in terms of non-X elements? I’m not talking about coming to an intellectual conclusion here. I’m talking about turning that sustained investigation, that sustained unfinding, into a dwelling place, a samadhi. Looking does not require tension, analysis, or confusion; only openness, awareness, curiosity. It is the foundation of the happiness proposed by Buddhism, and I think it has to be the foundation of any happiness that isn’t based on self-deception. Not looking is itself a kind of self-deception. This meditation leads to a sustained ease in the presence of the mysterious, ungraspable nature of our objects of mind.
2. Signlessness: If the object X is empty of a separate self, what about the signs that you encounter that you take as representatives of X? What do I mean by this? Taking visual signs as an example, what are the things that you can see or imagine that will bring to mind X? What is X defined only in terms of those qualities? Do they have self nature? Investigate the signs with the same kind of awareness that you used to investigate the object X. Second of all, if X is in some sense not really there in the way that you intuitively supposed it was before the meditation on emptiness, what then are these signs representative of? This door again leads to a dwelling, a state of concentration in which you develop a complete disinterest in grasping at signs. Conversely, because it reveals that signs, for all of their misleading and ephemeral characteristics, are the only representatives we have of the mysterious phenomenon X, and X itself can also be represented by many non-X elements, and all of those non-X elements will in turn have their own collections of signs, this concentration creates a felt sense that X is in some way always present, and can always be encountered, albeit as a mystery, in the present moment. Thay says that “the true nature of phenomena is beyond time and space,” but I don’t want to make any statement about the true nature of anything. All I am talking about is the practical result for you, the meditator, who is experiencing the samadhi of signlessness.
3. Aimlessness: This is the direct application of emptiness and signlessness to the habit energies that power the cycle of confused action, samsara. There are two kinds of confusion that make actions lead to suffering: confusion in the means and confusion in the ends. Aimlessness deals with confusion in the means, which can be further divided into practical means and psychological means. Let’s say you want to make soup (the ends), and you need to cut a carrot (the means.) You can cut the carrot with a knife, or with a guillotine (the practical means,) and you can cut it as a free person or as someone who hates their life but feels they have to keep on enduring it and, “I guess that means cutting this fucking carrot, and I don’t even like soup anyway,” (the psychological means.) Aimlessness deals only with this latter part, and only with a certain aspect of it. When emptiness and signlessness are applied to the soup-making process, the soup becomes in some way already present from the moment that the decision is made to make soup. In fact, the soup has been present from the beginning of time. There is no cause for grasping, tension, anxiety, or striving in the soup making process, because the soup is just as present in the uncut carrot as it is in the cut carrot, the boiling water, the burner, the propane delivery man. There may be a practical reason to try to make the soup quickly, and you may be aware of the kind of physical and mental engagement it takes to do that, but striving and struggling are absent. You can do it with a smile on your face. This is the final doorway to a profound sense of ease in action.
You may have noticed that the three doors of liberation do not deal directly with the problem, “I hate life and I hate soup.” Negativity has to be dealt with directly at its root, namely in the wounds, tensions, and complexes stored deep the in unexplored corners of the present moment. These are internal formations that influence the kinds of thoughts and actions that arise spontaneously, and until they are directly addressed, their influence will be seen, felt, and heard. What the practice of the doors of liberation brings to this process is: 1. Emptiness: a sense of lightness with regards to the solidity or fundamental realness of these internal formations. 2. Signlessness: an openness to the way that these formations can be recognized by signs that appear unrelated, and a sense of lightness around the signs that may be encountered as these formations are met by compassionate awareness and sublimated. 3. Aimlessness: a sense of unhurried ease in the whole process. Internal formations do not need to be frantically hunted like the last living members of a dangerous species. The lightness that comes from their transformation is already present in them, already present now. This moment can only be how it is. The only element that struggle adds to the present moment is struggle.
A few notes on Thay’s text:
1. The connection between the contemplation on Emptiness and ethics: I do not agree that this leads to the conclusion that “our happiness and suffering are the happiness and suffering of others,” or that “when we act based on nonself, our actions will be in accord with reality.” First of all, in the samadhi of emptiness no thought of self or other can arise, so you can’t really say anything about who the happiness and suffering belong to. You just deal with them for what they are in that context. This might lead to actions that some people will call compassionate or altruistic, but for the person in the samadhi, this is just dealing practically with a situation at hand. I think that as soon as you start talking in terms of you and me, no matter how lofty or nice it sounds, you’re already lost in the world of concepts. As for reality, I think this is a misleading word to apply to the way of seeing of a person who has extinguished concepts because it again employs an intuitive concept that we all have: that there is a real world “out there” somewhere that we would like to get at. This is all we can get at. In the case of a confused person, this may be characterized by certain delusions or self deceptions, and in the case of a free person, this may have a very different character, but a self-deception is just as real as an experience of clarity, or of non-conceptual awareness, or whatever. It’s just this. I’m not worried about reality, just about eliminating confusion, resistance, resentment, regret, etc.
2. Thay’s example about water is misleading. This is a pet peeve and I’ll go on a little digression here. If you don’t have any strong feelings about the water/H2O analogy, just skip it.
In the world of both spiritual and popular scientific writing there is a widespread bad habit of mixing natural language and scientific language. The language of science is constructed intellectually, and deliberately has different characteristics than natural language. This problem has become exacerbated by the fact that scientific vocabulary is being more and more integrated into everyday language, but without the underlying scientific understanding.
Human beings, in the course of their everyday lives, come up with words that represent important phenomena, and those words represent just that: whatever people use them for. Water, when I say it, does not mean “H2O.” Probably my intuitive concept of water is liquid water. That’s the one that’s important to me as a human being. I need to drink it from time to time or I’ll die. I don’t relate to water in the same way I do to, say, steam. If I’m thirsty, I don’t think of steam, and it would require quite extenuated circumstances and experiences for a thirsty person to look at steam and greedily lick their lips.
People over the ages have come up with different ways of imagining connections between these different phenomena (water, ice, steam,) and these are the beginnings of what we call science. When phenomena of radically different appearances and qualities, such as ice, water, and steam, are obviously connected in some way, it is natural to imagine some underlying substance in changing manifestations. The key word here is imagine. This imagined “real thing” can then be refined. The concepts of science are precise abstractions that are only given the characteristics needed to allow them to function in an internally consistent and practically applicable system of thought. People may use the word H2O and think they know what they mean, but chemistry is basically just a tool of calculation. It doesn’t say anything about what H2O is, and in fact no molecule (as a discrete, identifiable thing) has ever been found. The only thing that scientists have discovered by direct experience is that certain events in space time have certain characteristics. No one has ever seen the “thing” that caused these events. This is inherent to the fact that the human exploration of the world is achieved through the senses. In this sense, the scientific endeavor has revealed something similar to the process of Buddhist meditation, but there are serious practical and intellectual differences and I think comparing the two processes, while it may be interesting, is more misleading than anything because it leads to an exaggeration of the overlap.
In Buddhist meditation, you train to directly see how a lack of awareness leads you to take an unsteady, intuitive grasp of yourself and the world as the basis for suffering, and then you abandon that way of seeing and operating. As soon as the particular concepts employed are useful enough to help you to see the limitations of the conceptual apparatus as a whole, they no longer require elaboration. That’s why I’m still teaching meditation on the 5 skandhas even though these concepts are devoid of scientific meaning or use. The meditation works and that’s all that matters.
The approach and aim of science, especially since Newton, is totally different. Science is concerned with generating abstract, almost exclusively mathematical systems that can be used to make calculations that will correspond with observations. A star in science is a mathematical object, not what you see when you look at the sky at night. The success of science has led to a critical exploration of both ends of the scientific endeavor: the conceptual structures and the process of observation, and that exploration has led to some very interesting conclusions about the limitations of both. Those conclusions can, I think, come to bear on human suffering, but to really apply them you need to understand them, and that takes time and study. Once you have done that work, and you understand that when someone says, H2O, they are talking about a abstract entity with certain properties, and that the only reality that we can associate with that entity is a collection of measurements taken at different points in space-time, then maybe the scientific process will have led you to a certain lightness or ease or lack of suffering with regard to water and its various forms. Maybe.
Nonetheless, H2O is still first and foremost an intellectual abstraction. It is not the “true nature” of water. I think Thay knows this and is using this as a kind of metaphor, but it is a metaphor that literally couldn’t be farther from the truth of the situation. First of all, if I’m a non-scientific person, saying that H2O is the true nature of water “beyond signs” is going to suggest to me that water has some true nature and that it is a substance, a discrete, findable thing, because my intuitive concepts lead me to imagine H2O as a molecule, as basically three marbles attached by sticks. That is just how my natural, non-scientific concept functions, and by following it I find myself standing right back out in front of the first door of liberation thinking, “Didn’t I just go in here?” The situation is even worse if you know that H2O is a mathematical abstraction made to function within a certain system of thought, because obviously these meditations are intended to lead away from the realm of concepts, and not to lead to the conclusion that the true nature of water, steam and ice, “beyond the signs,” is conceptual. Thay says, “Before we can touch H2O, we have to let go of signs,” and this is total nonsense. Even if I replace H2O with “the true nature of phenomena,” it’s still nonsense. Going beyond the signs doesn’t lead you to any discernible thing, except maybe a sense of ease and a smile.
